Shanidze Lab

This project investigates the properties of smooth pursuit eye movements in individuals with macular degeneration. Commonly believed to be a fovea-linked eye movement, smooth pursuit has not been previously investigated in individuals with central field loss, despite its importance for tracking moving objects, such as vehicles or pedestrians on a busy street.

Falls in older adults are common, have high societal and monetary costs, often lead to injury and can even be fatal. It is known that noise can damage the vestibular periphery resulting in postural instability and compromised balance. This project investigates how natural aging is accelerated by lifetime noise exposure, and how that can lead to impaired vestibular function, contributing to propensity to fall.

Current eye tracking and calibration algorithms do not accommodate eccentric viewing and the capacity for accurate eye tracking is difficult to assess in individuals with central visual field loss, and few studies of naturalistic oculomotor behavior exist. To address this problem, we are developing a binocular robotic model of the human eyes that can simulate fixation and eye movements with an eccentric preferred retinal locus in one or both eyes and allow for precise assessment of eye tracking performance of head mounted computer vision-based eye tracking systems.